Allan
Bennett

(1872 -
1923)

bio (c)
2001 / 2008 Fra. Petros Xristos Magister (8=3)

Allan Bennett was
born in London and orphaned at an early age. In many respects his
early life parallels that of his friend Aleister
Crowley (three years his junior.) Both men were raised in strict
religious environments (Crowley a fundamentalist, Bennett a Catholic)
and both rejected Christianity while still in their teens; both also
experienced powerful religious states (samadhi)
which drove them to pursue altered states of conscious all their
lives. Both men were, of course, associated with the Golden Dawn
(thus their inclusion on our site) and both travelled to Asia to
continue their spiritual explorations (at one point Crowley sought
out his friend in Sri Lanka and Burma.) Both were pioneers in the
field of syncretic experimental religion, bringing the mysticism of
the Orient to educated Westerners -- more than half a century before
writers like Alan Watts and others started the real modern-day
revolution in Western spiritual thought which America and England are
still reeling from.

Bennett was
(formally or informally) adopted by MacGregor
Mathers who (when he was nearing adulthood) initiated him into
the Golden Dawn where he became known as Frater Iehi Aour ("Let
there be light.") He attained the important grade of Adeptus
Minor at the young age of twenty-three, and was highly regarded in
the Order for his magical abilities which were considered equalled
only by those of Mathers himself. He assisted Mathers in collecting
and editing a mass of written material for the Order, including the
raw data that would eventually go into Crowley's 777
qabalistic text. His debilitating asthma made it difficult for
Bennett to earn a living and required him to resort to regular
ministrations of morphine, cocaine and other drugs, which weakened
his body but not his resolve; perhaps this also gave him the time to
work with Mathers in research and textual editing, one of the few
tasks which a near-invalid is capable of.

Bennett's academic
field of study was (like Crowley's) natural science and chemistry,
and for a while he worked in a chemical laboratory. When not rooming
with the Mathers, he lived alone in a small flat in a poor district
of London with few personal possessions. This natural asceticism no
doubt led him in the direction of Buddhism, and the first
Buddhist-related text he studied was Sir Edwin Arnold's The Light
of Asia, one of the few books about the Buddha then available in
the West. He also lived with Crowley for a short time at the latter's
Chancery Lane flat, where the pair pursued their common passions of
magic and practical mysticism, no doubt assisted by liberal doses of
the above-mentioned chemical agents.

In 1900, with the
Golden Dawn in shambles, and disillusioned by Mathers' antagonism
toward "Orientalism," Bennett took ship for Sri Lanka
where he studied Pali in a monastery and became a pupil of a
well-known yogi, Sri Parananda, who taught him Hatha Yoga (physical
postures or asanas) as well as Pranayama (breathing techniques
for meditation.) He also welcomed Crowley while in Kandy, and shared
a house there, teaching Crowley the basics of yoga.

Bennett later
travelled to Burma (Myanmar) and became a bhikku (Theravedin
monk), living with no possessions and maintaining other strict vows
in regards to diet, sleep, and celibacy in the company of his fellow
monks. He officially joined the sangha (community of
Buddhists) and took the name Ananda Matteya ("Bliss of Matteya,"
a future incarnation of Buddha). Crowley came to visit him in Burma,
and writes about his experience in the Confessions; his
meeting with Bennett was the catalyst to his own further spiritual
work which resulted in a powerful samadhi experience on the
China/Burma border in 1905.

Crowley admired
Bennett all his life both for his intellect and his spiritual force,
and wrote a short poem in his honor. Bennett was one of the first
modern Westerners to actually convert to Buddhism and become a
Buddhist monk; this is an event of some significance in the
two-thousand year history of Buddhism, and Bennett's name is
frequently found in modern books about the history of Buddhism. He
also created the first society for the promotion of Buddhism in
England.

Bennett was not
fully satisfied with his life in the sangha; perhaps put off by
cultural dissonances, or feeling his health (always weak) suffer from
the rigors of the monastic lifestyle, or from the humid tropical
climate, he returned to England and continued his work in the Western
magical tradition. He again rented a small, sparsely furnished room,
with little but a small table / altar for a meditational focus, and a
few valued books. One of the few true ritual accoutrements that he
kept was a "blasting rod," a highly charged magical wand
that he mounted in a wooden handle painted or carved with various
power words. Bennett was also dedicated to finding some means of
communication with the astral world, and, exploiting his latent
scientific bent, experimented with machinery towards achieving this
end.

From England,
Bennett intended to make his way to California in hopes that the
superb climate would help the asthma from which he suffered all his
life. He never made it, instead dying in England at the age of 51. He
left behind almost no possessions but his manuscripts which would go
largely unrecognized for decades. It would not be until the "beat"
writers of the 1950s, and later the psychedelic revolution of the
1960s, that Buddhism would become the popular force it is today in
the Western world, and that Bennett would gain at least some of the
recognition he deserved as a pioneer bringing Buddhism to England and
America.